from the Homeric Hymn to Hermes 28Conflict ResolvedThats sweet. I want one! 29Hermes Expert Use of a Creation Myth

Song is itself a cure for strife

Theogony 99-104 For if anyone is grieved, if his heart is sore with fresh sorrow, if he is troubled, and a singer who serves the Muses chants the deeds of past men or the blessed gods ... He soon forgets his heartache, and of all his cares he remembers none.

Cosmogony and Theogony Singing about the ordering of the universe prevents disorder

30Why tell Creation stories?Distinct Uses of Creation Myths

Hopi Creation

Spider Woman leads the people out of the underworlds teaches them how to live

What telling this myth does

ethical instruction (how to hunt, grow corn, build houses)

sites of present habitation explained by what happened on the mythic journey out of the underworld

31The Function of Navajo Creation Myths

During the Blessing Way ceremony, shaman chants the creation story

Sand painting representing the creation

Creation story used for rites of new Beginnings

Navajo saindpainting of the creation of the universe 32The Function of Babylonian Creation Myths 33The Function of Babylonian Creation Myths

Told at the dedication of sacred buildings

In the beginning Anu (sky) created the heavens, and Nudimmud (Ea-waters) created Apsu, the primeval waters. Then Ea took some clay and created necessary elements for the buildings of great structures. He made the Arazu, the gods of the various crafts.

34Questions

Why did Hesiod tell his creation story in the way that he did?

Why did Ovid tell his creation story in the way that he did?

35

Hesiods Theogony

36Hesiod Who was he?

lived around 700 BCE

Boeotian (central Greece)

Composed

Theogony (origins of gods and universe)

Works and Days (wisdom poetry)

Hesiodic works (attributed to Hesiod in antiquity)

Catalog of Women (birth stories of the heroes, continuation of the Theogony)

The legendary singer Orpheus sang of that past age when earth and sky and sea were knit together in a single mold how they were divided after deadly strife how the stars, the moon, and the traveling sun keep faithfully to their stations in the heavens how mountains rose, and how, together with their Nymphs, the murmuring streams and all four-legged creatures came to be. How in the beginning, Ophion and Eurynome, daughter of Ocean, governed the world from snow-clad Olympus how they were forcibly supplanted, Ophion by Cronos, Eurynome by Rhea of their fall into the waters of Ocean and how their successors ruled the happy Titan gods when Zeus in his Dictaean cave was still a child, with childish thoughts, before the earthborn Cyclopes had given him the bolt, the thunder and lightening that form his glorious weapons today.

Apollonius, Argonautica 1.496-511

66Ovids Creation Myth

Till God, or kindlier Nature, Settled all argument and separated Heaven from earth, water from land, our air From the high stratosphere, a liberation So things evolved, and out of blind confusion, Found each its place, bound in eternal order... Met. 21ff

Ovid 67Ovids Different Kind of MythThe creation of mortals

but something else was needed, a finer being, More capable of mind, a sage, a ruler,

So Man was born, it may be, in Gods image,

Or Earth, perhaps, so newly separated

From the old fire of Heaven, still retained

Some seed of the celestial force which refasioned

Gods out of the living clay and running water.

All other animals look downward Man,

Alone, erect, can raise his face toward Heaven.

Metamorphoses 72ff

68Ovids Different Kind of MythThe creation of mortalsDeucalion and Pyrrha throw stones to create people 69Ovids different kind of myth-making Chaos and Craftsman

Before the ocean was, or earth, or heaven, Nature was all alike, a shapelessness, Chaos, so-called, all rude and lumpy matter, Nothing but bulk, inert, in whose confusion Discordant atoms warred... Heat fought with cold, wet fought with dry, the hard fought with the soft... till God, or kindlier Nature, settled all argument, and separated Heaven from earth, water from land, etc. Ovid Metamorphoses 1.5-23

In the beginning was the silver cosmic egg, created by Time. Phanes broke forth from the egg as the firstborn (Protogonos), the androgynous container of all the seeds of life. It was Phanes who created the universe, beginning with a daughter Nux (Night), and later the familiar gods, Gaia and Ouranos

77Ovids different kind of myth-making

Before the ocean was, or earth, or heaven, Nature was all alike, a shapelessness, Chaos, so-called, all rude and lumpy matter, Nothing but bulk, inert, in whose confusion Discordant atoms warred... Heat fought with cold, wet fought with dry, the hard fought with the soft... till God, or kindlier Nature, settled all argument, and separated Heaven from earth, water from land, etc. Ovid Metamorphoses 1.5-23

Ovid starts by describing creation from Chaos (like Hesiod) but then describes creation through a divine craftsman.

79Ovids Agenda

Some Possibilities

Kingship criticism of imperial power?

Re-asserting mythic explanations against philosophic ones

Entertainment Exploiting the literary tradition of myth-telling

80Replaying Creation

every construction or fabrication has the cosmogony as paradigmatic model. The creation of the world becomes the archetype of every creative human gesture, whatever its plane of reference may be.

(Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 1957)

Might we find the creation myth replayed elsewhere, in miniature, in part, or in spirit? 81Creation Myths

Hesiods Theogony and Ovids Metamorphoses

Allen Romanoaromano_at_uchicago.edubackground Muses

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